Benicio Del Toro has a penchant for playing troubled characters. His latest is a junkie desperately trying to go straight in “Things We Lost in the Fire.” What’s the attaction of dark roles?
“They pay better,” he joked. “No, I don’t know – I guess I understand them. Or think I do.”
Wouldn’t he ever want to be a romantic leading man?
“Well, yeah. I am at home,” he answered.
While some actors count the number of pages they have in a script and others mine their past and present relationships, Del Toro doesn’t actually look at the characters. “I look more at the story and if I like the story, if a story has a journey, then usually there’s gonna be conflict inside the character. If a story’s gonna have conflict, the characters are gonna have conflict. So I like stories with conflict.”
Del Toro’s junkie Jerry has plenty. A lawyer who went from cocaine to crack to heroin to skid row, he’s invited by his best friend’s widow (played by Halle Berry) to move in and help with her two young children.
To avoid druggy cliches, the actor researched the realities. “I went out, met some people, got information about addiction,” he said, citing an addiction expert physician and then read “William Burroughs’ ‘Junkie,’ it’s a pretty good book about addiction.”
Del Toro met recovering addicts, attended N.A. meetings. “And then life,” he added. “I don’t know, in my case I’ve had friends, friends of friends, family friends, that have had problems with addiction, so there’s life too. You draw from life. That was my recipe for my research.”
A Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner for Traffic (2000), Del Toro, 40, is back in the year-end awards race. “Well, it’s an honor, to be part of a list with actors and actresses and filmmakers, being part of that tradition, being in the books, that’s fantastic. But you don’t do it for that.”
As for this year, he smiled. “If it happens, let it rip! And if it doesn’t, yeah. Kicking and screaming,” he laughed. “Look at yourself in the mirror and try to accept it anyways.”
